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Rick Perry will outline a plan next week to replace the U.S. tax code with a federal “flat tax,” he told an audience in Las Vegas Wednesday.
Perry’s plan, he told the Western Republican Leadership Conference, “starts with scrapping the three million words of the current tax code, starting over with something simpler: a flat tax.”
“I want to make the tax code so simple that even Timothy Geithner can file his taxes on time,” Perry said, in a reference to the Treasury secretary’s personal tax slip-ups.
The Texas governor is scheduled to give an October 25 speech on jobs and taxes, the second of several policy addresses he’s delivering this month.
Perry hasn’t spelled out the details of his “flat tax” plan yet, but he began to draw a contrast in Tuesday night’s debate between his approach to the issue and Herman Cain’s catchy – and increasingly scrutinized – “9-9-9” plan.
Voters, Perry said, are “not interested in 9-9-9. What they're interested in is flatter and fairer.”
The idea of replacing the current, progressive tax system with a flat tax isn’t a new one: Steve Forbes made it a centerpiece of his presidential campaigns. But no candidate as high-profile as Perry has yet made it a major part of the 2012 race.
Perry didn’t mention any of his Republican opponents by name in his speech to the Western GOP group Wednesday, but he continued to cast himself as the consistent conservative in the race, in an implicit contrast with Mitt Romney.
“I am not the candidate of the establishment. You won’t hear a lot of shape-shifting nuance from me,” he said, promising “unbridled truth” instead.
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